himself in bribing or frightening the European powers into a guarantee of the Pragmatic Sanction, which, as we have already said, named Maria Theresa as sole heiress of the Austrian dominions. He succeeded at last in every one of these applications. But the aged Eugene in vain reminded him that his only real guarantee would be found in 30,000 bayonets. Charles accordingly was no sooner dead than Frederic of Prussia, confident that the other powers would sooner or later yield to the temptations which had prevailed with himself, put in his claims to the province of Silesia. The House of Bavaria was soon ready with a forged will in support of its claims to Austria Proper. In Italy and Spain too, the tide was rising on the position of Maria Theresa, with equal rapidity; and Belleisle lost no time in taking it at the flood. In an elaborate memorial which he presented to the French cabinet, he won the ear of Louis XV. by combining a scheme of daring aggression with a complete and lucid exposition of the details which were to effect it. A commanding intervention of France at the approaching Electoral Diet, the elevation of the Bavarian family to the Throne of the Cæsars, the aggrandisement of Prussia in the North, the cession of Moravia to Saxony, and the political annihilation of Germany consequent on her being thus broken into four kingdoms of the second class, -such were the daring projects and brilliant results promised by Belleisle! Brilliant beyond precedent for the elevation of France into the permanent centre of the continent,-even should his plan have been curtailed of its expected complement for extending her geographical limits by the advance of her frontier to the Rhine, and the annexation of the Spiritual Electorates. To support his scheme, he asked only for 150,000 men; 100,000 of whom were to co-operate with Bavaria, on the Danube, while 50,000 were to form an army of observation at home. The disposition of Northern Germany was to be left to the King of Prussia.

If this plan had ever a chance of success, it depended on its being heartily and warmly prosecuted; but Fleury had still influence enough to cripple, though he lacked courage to oppose, it. While Belleisle was glittering at Munich and Francfort, out-dazzling sovereign princes with his sumptuous retinues, and fascinating Frederic at Berlin by the hardihood and rapidity of his strategic plans, Fleury contrived that the army of the Danube should be reduced to 40,000 men, and that France should preserve appearances by refusing to declare war upon Austria in her own name, and by affecting to act merely as the ally of Bavaria. The various pretenders to the inheritance of Maria Theresa were, nevertheless, soon formed into one compact body; and, by the spring of

1741, the House of Austria found itself opposed to the hereditary alliance of the French and Spanish Bourbons, backed by the subordinate courts of Sardinia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia.

The long peace had already been broken, in 1739, by the war between Spain and England. The Jacobites, obedient to the same instinct which taught Stanhope and Walpole that the tranquillity of Europe was necessary to secure our throne to the House of Hanover, had concentrated all the malignity of their opposition on the task of driving us into a war. A heterogeneous party had, accordingly, been formed in Parliament; strengthened alike by deserters whom Walpole's twenty years of patronage had alienated, and by younger and more ardent politicians, who revolted from the sordid accompaniments of his government. They had gathered round a large nucleus of the agricultural and ecclesiastical faction, which had triumphed for a moment with Sacheverel; and these latter brought to the alliance a valuable contingent of the narrowest provincialism and the vulgarest nationality. Bolingbroke, excluded from the House of Lords, but wielding, out of doors, an influence in kind perhaps unexampled in our history, was the moving spring of the combination. Skilfully keeping mooted questions in abeyance, offering in his own genius and in Sir William Wyndham's parliamentary abilities, a full compensation for the incumbrance of the stupid and irritable party with which he was still connected, he steered them safely through the embarrassments necessarily produced by their discordant materials. Their only chance of national support lay in rousing the national antipathies in their favour: And at length, when Elizabeth of Parma, (provoked, as it is said, by Walpole's refusal to interfere on the extinction of the House of Medici,) redoubled the severity with which the Spanish coast-guard treated the contraband trade carried on with America in English vessels, the people, deceived and indignant, clamoured loudly for war. Walpole yielded, against his judgment; and gained nothing by the tardy concession. The Opposition was determined not to trust him with the conduct of a war he had disapproved; nor, as it would seem, to leave a single chance of averting a general European conflagration. We find it actually charged against him as a high offence, that he still looked to the possibility of stopping the Spanish war, by Cardinal Fleury's mediation! But that resource was now withdrawn; and in 1741 (a year before Walpole's fall) England was engaged in a war with Spain on her own account; and was allied to the House of Austria, in opposition to Bavaria and France.

The campaign of 1741, like all in which France takes the leading part, opened brilliantly. The army of observation, under Marshal Maillebois, menaced the King of England's Electoral dominions; and speedily frightened the Government of Hanover into concluding a neutrality for itself. In the south, the grand army, under the nominal command of the King of Bavaria, rapidly passing through Austria, took Passau and Linz; forced Maria Theresa to retire with her court to Presburg, and, turning northwards into Bohemia, invested Prague. At Linz Charles Albert of Bavaria was proclaimed Archduke of Austria; on the 23d of November he was crowned King of Bohemia; and, in the following February, Emperor of Germany. But on the very day of the latter solemnity, Munich, his hereditary capital, was stormed and sacked by Mentzel, the famous partizan chief, at the head of a half-civilised horde from Hungary and the Tyrol; and all Bavaria then lay open to their ravages. In the meantime the French army was shut up in Prague, and kept in check by the Austrian forces. Maillebois, as the year 1742 advanced, descending from Hanover into Southern Germany, to relieve Belleisle, who had joined the invading army, was cramped by Fleury's positive injunctions not to risk a battle; and, at the close of the campaign, disgraced for having obeyed them. Finally, in the depth of winter, 1742-3, Belleisle left Prague, and accomplished a retreat which, we believe, holds a high place in military history; but it was accompanied by horrors which M. de Tocqueville compares to those of Napoleon's return from Moscow. On his arrival in Franconia, in the spring of 1743, the remnant of his army was broken up. Neither his former popularity, nor the skill with which he had extricated himself from his disastrous position, protected him from the fate of Maillebois. He was ordered to leave Versailles, and to assume the government of Metz. The Hanoverian and English troops, released from the army of observation, had also marched south, and, in May of the same year, defeated a third French army at Dettingen. The reverses of the French arms were followed by the defection of their allies: And the first example was set by Prussia and Sardinia.

There is a singular analogy between the history of these two It originates in their position; and has been continued in the points which most nearly redeem the errors of their rulers. Prussia and the Sardinian States, alike without natural or defensible frontiers, have been almost necessarily forced, by the instinct of self-preservation, into a policy of craft and violence. Alike pressed upon by France and Austria, they have scarcely ever taken a step permanently backwards. Ever since Albert of

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Brandenburgh declared his independence, the history of Prussia is a record of provinces forcibly torn from Poland, from Austria, and Sweden. The history of the House of Savoy again, has found its exponent in the Piedmontese proverb, that Lombardy is like an artichoke, and must be eaten leaf by leaf. But, however this selfish policy may have been embraced, it is due to these states to recollect how with each of them it has been subordinated to an honourable sense of German and of Italian nationality. Always ready to purchase fresh provinces by supporting intruders, neither Prussia nor Sardinia have ever failed to arrest their progress, as soon as there seemed a danger of foreign influence overlaying the institutions and crushing the spirit of their common country. And this analogy has been again very curiously illustrated in the course of the last twelvemonth, when almost the same day brought intelligence of the bold grasp which, amid the crash of thrones and the abortion of constitutions, Prussia and Sardinia respectively made, at the chieftainship of the German and the Italian races. Alas for Prussia, should the resemblance in working out this last experiment also coincide!

In Italy the Spanish Bourbons had reluctantly acknowledged the Austrian supremacy; and it was still doubtful, whether the expulsion of the barbarians would convert Lombardy into a French Prefecture under Don Philip, or merge it into the Sardinian States and place Charles Emmanuel at its head as King of Upper Italy. Maria Theresa was plainly interested in allowing full scope for the development of these divergent interests; and it has been surmised that, in hopes of frightening the King of Sardinia into a peace, Admiral Haddock, who commanded the Mediterranean fleet, was ordered not to oppose the landing of the Spanish troops in the Bay of Spezzia. The result turned out as had been expected. The house of Savoy being already inclosed by Bourbon Princes, in France, in Naples, and in Parma, its eastern frontier was now to be menaced by a fourth establishment in Lombardy. Charles Emmanuel hastened to make peace at Turin; and in September, 1743, concluded the Treaty of Worms, by which he engaged to assist in defending Lombardy, in return for several additions to his northern and eastern frontier.

In the meantime Frederic had also broken off from his allies. Dazzled as he was by Belleisle's genius, he had never agreed to the scheme of erecting Louis XV. into the Lord Paramount of Germany. Silesia once secured, he co-operated lazily with the French armies in Bohemia; and at last, under Lord Hyndfort's mediation, concluded the Peace of Breslau- an arrangement by

which England afterwards guaranteed his peaceful possession of Silesia.

His allies thus falling off, and France stunned by her reverses, Charles Albert of Bavaria was prepared to acquiesce in the ruin of his brilliant expectations. In 1744, conferences were opened at Hanau, when he offered to renounce all his claims to the Austrian inheritance, in return for being acknowledged as emperor, and allowed a monthly subsidy from England. The English ministry, and especially Lord Carteret, were severely blamed for letting slip this opportunity of terminating the war: But Maria Theresa was inflexible. Her own spirit, and that of her Hungarian and Bohemian mountaineers, had communicated itself to her councils; and now, when the formidable coalition which had driven her from town to town was breaking up, she would not hear of peace, unless Bavaria united its forces to the Austrians, and joined her in a vigorous effort to wrest back Alsace and Lorraine from France. She reckoned on the failing courage and visible hesitation that now ruled the French Court. But France was on the eve of a crisis, tantamount to a change of ministry, which revived the half-extinguished embers of the quarrel.

Fleury, distrusted, like Walpole, by the promoters of a war in which he had reluctantly engaged, had sunk beneath the mortifications and anxiety consequent on Belleisle's retreat from Prague. He died in January, 1743; and with his last breath, forgetting how effectually he had crushed every generous impulse in his pupil's mind, he implored Louis XV. to have no more first ministers, but in future to govern for himself. Louis followed half his advice; and the sway of a first minister only gave place to that of a mistress. For the next thirty years, Madame de Chateauroux, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame du Barri, were the real prime ministers of France. Not only did these ladies enjoy the intimate confidence of the monarch, not only were their whims ostentatiously gratified, and their patronage assiduously sought, but they were formally recognised as constitutional authorities- if the word is not a misnomer, when applied to any functionaries in an oriental despotism. To them the secretaries of state addressed regular reports, and under their inspection conducted public business. At first, indeed, the change was rather for the better; the few months during which Louis XV. showed some regard for public duty were due to Madame de Chateauroux. But there is a tragic solemnity in her dazzling rise and appalling end, which transports us from the gaudy antechambers of Versailles, to the broad shadows and lurid atmosphere of an old Greek legend.